DESCRIPTION: The project will study the feasibility of using ASR in real- time captioning services for the hearing impaired. A prototype system will be developed for captioning live broadcasts using speech shadowing by an operator whose speech is then recognized and used to generate television captions. Shadow captioning can be performed on speaker-adapted recognizers which have relatively low error rates. To evaluate the system, its output will be compared to that of commercial stenocaptioning technology. The objective of Phase I is to establish shadow captioning as a competitive alternative to stenocaptioning. In Phase II, a fully developed prototype will be evaluated under field conditions. Long-term project goals include the production and commercialization of affordable, PC-based speech recognition systems that can be purchased and operated by television program producers at a fraction of current captioning costs. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: NOT AVAILABLE